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little one carousel business,“ explains Lee. It was sold to another T-shirt group, and then Lee bought it back two years later, while he was in his mid-20s. These days, the company is turning over £30 million a year – up from £6 million just five years ago. This substantial growth has been noticed: Lee says he had “a very, very good offer“ during the summer to buy the company, but he‘s not interested at the moment. At present, the company comprises four businesses: Fresh Air, which is the original screen print business; Brands In, the licensing section that was founded five years ago; Absolute Cult, an online company which has been operating for a couple of years; and a partnership in Silk City, a US print business based in Paterson, New Jersey. The US operation adopts a similar trade-only, vertically integrated business model to Fresh Air‘s UK print shop. It is currently a screen print operation, producing work for some big domestic customers, although that‘s likely to change. “What “I t‘s not easy, there‘s not a lot around,“ says Lee Craze, director of Fresh Air. Finding new premises is never straightforward, but Lee‘s search is on a different level to most. He is looking to move to a factory of around 100,000 sq ft, which is four times the size of Fresh Air‘s current building. It needs to be near a large post office that is capable of handling the thousands of parcels the company dispatches each day, and also not too far from the company‘s current home in Brent, north-west London – staff are important to Fresh Air and retaining them is a top priority. Veneta, who is one of Fresh Air’s most experienced printers, has been with the company for 23 years, while Dominica, another lead printer, has 12 years under her belt. Both are “phenomenally good printers“, says Lee. The move is planned for 2020 and brings into sharp focus just how far Fresh Air has come since the company was founded more than 40 years ago by Lee‘s father and uncle. “It was a tiny, tiny New screen printing equipment, new pre-press equipment, a new packaging line and plans afoot to move six companies under one (very large) new roof – there‘s a lot going on at Fresh Air, discovers Images Abreath of FreshAir we‘re probably going to do is end up putting a lot of DTG into that business. We‘ve just bought a Brother GTX to get the basics going, and then we‘ll be manufacturing for our print-on- demand,“ says Lee. Back in the UK, Fresh Air, Brands In and Absolute Cult all operate under the one roof, and they will be joined in the new premises by additional decoration businesses. “I‘m involved in three other print businesses as well,“ Lee reveals. He won‘t name them at the moment, although he does say they are all based in the Home Counties. It will, he says, make his life a lot easier to have all the businesses working from one location. “It will be one big operation with everything centralised; there will be a lot of machines. We‘ll have bigger and better facilities with the companies all operating under one roof.“ Vertical ambitions The scale of Fresh Air’s current operation is already impressive. Well- known for screen printing music merch, an average day for the company involves the production of 30,000 screen prints and 1,200 DTG prints and the posting out of around 1,500 Royal Mail packages a day; 5,000 on a busy day. Its DTG output is especially notable given that it wasn’t even involved in this sector two years ago. The scaling up began in earnest five years ago with the recognition that The efficient screen department now includes a Spyder II DTS DECORATOR PROFILE www.images-magazine.com JANUARY 2019 images 32 The new M&R 16-colour Chameleon double- decker manual carousel